Essay: The Alchemy of Games

Near the beginning of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, before Harry goes to the Quidditch World Cup, he wakes on Privet Drive, having “seen” Voldemort kill an old man in what may or may not have been a dream. Dreams—like fairy tales, toys, and games—are disregarded and considered unimportant by many characters in the Harry Potter series, as well as in our world. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 1: The Kids’ Table.) Harry recalls that before he fell asleep the night before, he had been reading Flying with the Cannons, a book about the Chudley Cannons Quidditch team. Even when the war scene comes first, JK Rowling tells us that Harry was reading about metaphorical war right before that. After witnessing Frank Bryce’s murder, he is again drawn to this book.

Another early reference to games and violence in the fourth Harry Potter book is when Harry writes a letter to Sirius, telling his godfather that Dudley’s diet isn’t going well so his parents have threatened to cut off his pocket money, and in response, Dudley “chucked his PlayStation out of the window.” Harry explains to Sirius that it’s like a computer for playing games, and we know that Dudley’s favorite computer activity is blowing things up. Even in the minor details that Rowling includes, games and violence are linked.

The next battle for Harry is to go to the World Cup. He fights a real war to go to a metaphorical one. Vernon never wants to make Harry happy but he also doesn’t want him around more than necessary. When the Weasleys arrive on Privet Drive it’s an all-out invasion. They’ve temporarily added the Dursleys’ living room fireplace to the Floo Network so they can take Harry to their home but the fireplace in question has been walled off, because the Dursleys use an electric fire, so the Weasleys almost destroy the living room at Number Four, Privet Drive while trying to enter the house through the boarded-up fireplace.

The Weasley twins take advantage of the chaos, leaving Ton-Tongue Toffees for Dudley to find. These are “joke” sweets, which Arthur Weasley does not think are very funny when Dudley’s tongue keeps growing and he has to shrink it to normal size again, to prevent Dudley choking. The snake-imagery used to describe Dudley’s enlarged tongue is a callback to the book’s opening, when Voldemort’s enormous snake, Nagini, finds Frank Bryce. This is how Rowling describes Harry’s view of the melee as he leaves:

...his last fleeting glimpse of the living room was of Mr. Weasley blasting a third ornament out of Uncle Vernon’s hand with his wand, Aunt Petunia screaming and lying on top of Dudley, and Dudley’s tongue lolling around like a great slimy python.

After Harry arrives at the Burrow, he’s very interested in what Fred and George are up to: Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes, a business to sell “joke stuff” that is “a bit dangerous”.

Percy, no longer Head Boy at Hogwarts, discusses his work at the Ministry of Magic, in the Department of International Cooperation, especially working with the department head of Magical Games and Sports, Ludo Bagman, a former professional Quidditch player. Percy also mentions that Bagman’s employee, Bertha Jorkins, has gone missing. We learn later that Bertha was magically coerced by Peter Pettigrew and Voldemort to tell them about the Triwizard Tournament being at Hogwarts. Since this is a metaphorical war, it seems to strike the Dark Lord as precisely the venue for attacking Harry. This information comes from a person in Magical Games and Sports, which continues Rowling’s consistent game-to-war pattern.

While Harry is staying with the Weasleys, he will get to go to the final match of the Quidditch World Cup. To do so, Harry, Hermione, the Weasleys and their wizarding neighbors, Amos and Cedric Diggory, use a Portkey, a charmed object that takes someone from one specific site to another by touching it at the right moment. Harry goes to a magical sporting event, a metaphorical war, by Portkey, with Cedric Diggory, foreshadowing Harry and Cedric again traveling by Portkey—the Triwizard Tournament Cup—to a real war that has segued from the metaphorical war of the Tournament.

The World Cup spectators sleep on a large campground in magical tents. They’ve come to watch a metaphorical war but are behaving as if they are in a real war, since camping began as a wartime activity. They aren’t playing at war (yet). For the benefit of the Muggles who work at the campground, they’re playing at being Muggles, some more successfully than others.

Having met Cedric, who will be a fellow Champion in the Tournament, Harry “meets” another Champion at the campground: Viktor Krum, seen scowling in numerous posters all over the camp, which is appropriate for someone embodying the godfather variant of the Wise Old Man, like Sirius, whose image was everywhere in the wizarding world in the third book. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 2: This Old Man.) Krum is a Seeker, like Cedric; they share this “rank” with Harry, who sees Cho Chang, the Seeker for Ravenclaw, in the camp, a link between the metaphorical war of Quidditch and the war for someone’s heart.

Bagman is something of an overgrown schoolboy, which is fitting for the head of Magical Games and Sports. He tries to interest other spectators in bets on the World Cup, which seems like a conflict of interest for someone in his position at best and illegal at worst, but gambling, in its way, is a logical extension of a life that has games at its center. Ludo Bagman represents the dark side of games, even ones that don’t become literal rather than metaphorical battles. He compromises his office’s integrity by offering Harry assistance in the Tournament so he can make money by placing bets on Harry. Bagman seems to regularly bet on sporting events, based on his avoidance of some goblins who are either bookies themselves or the “muscle” for a bookman to whom Bagman is, presumably, deeply indebted. Betting turns games that are mock wars into real war for him, and it could be life-threatening for him if he fails to pay up.

Harry, Hermione and the Weasleys have seats at the Quidditch World Cup near a house-elf who works for Percy’s boss, Barty Crouch, Senior. Harry doesn’t know that she’s actually with Barty Crouch, Junior, who’s hiding under an Invisibility Cloak. JK Rowling paved the way for this enemy in the previous book with the revelation about Scabbers being Peter Pettigrew. Like Peter’s death, the son’s death was faked—in this case, by his father—and the son, a loyal servant of Voldemort’s, waiting to return to his master, has lived in secrecy since not long after Voldemort’s fall. His elf, Winky, is the only living being besides his father and Peter Pettigrew who knows that he’s alive.

The World Cup is Hermione’s first exposure to house-elves and she’s livid, even more so when she learns that elves are responsible for the students’ comfort at Hogwarts, because this makes her feel complicit in their oppression. Harry is surprised by Dobby’s reaction to his treating him as an equal in Chamber of Secrets, but Hermione is insistent that elves be treated with dignity and not discounted for being non-humans, which goes along with her innate sense of justice, a large part of her being an archetypal Mother. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 4: Mother, May I?) Again, something or someone considered inferior and childlike proves to be more important in the grand scheme of things than their status suggests. This is true for Winky and Dobby here and for Kreacher and Dobby in the sixth and seventh books.

Ireland’s and Bulgaria’s Quidditch teams, like Slytherin and Gryffindor, wear green and red, respectively. Bulgaria’s Seeker, Viktor Krum, is a Harry-doppelganger and a power-sharer. The match is typically violent and Bulgaria loses because, even though Bulgaria is down by many points, Krum pushes himself to end the match, since both he and others are injured and in pain. After he does this, the glory is shared. Ireland wins the World Cup, but Krum is the one who catches the Snitch so he’s responsible for the outcome. However, he is not reviled for sharing power in this way. The crowd erupts in “a resounding, ear-splitting roar” of approval for Krum. 

 What follows is a bit of a digression, but the madness of my method will be clear soon. There’s a story about the 1976 Special Olympics in Spokane, Washington that has developed into something of an urban legend. The Special Olympics is a competition first held in July of 1968 to give people with “intellectual disabilities” the opportunity to compete in various track and field events, plus swimming and floor hockey. The current number of events has grown to 31.

In the 1976 games, nine competitors began the 100-yard dash and partway through the race one of the runners fell; hearing his cries, the other eight runners went to help the fallen runner get up, and, arms linked, the nine crossed the finish line together.

Isn’t that a great story? The only problem with it is—it isn’t actually true. You may even have heard the story, or a version of it, or seen a meme somewhere online about it, and assumed that it was true. However, what really happened that day is that only a handful of runners went to assist their fallen rival while the rest continued the race to the finish line. But in spite of the truth being even more compelling in some ways than the myth that has circulated ever since, the myth is interesting as well, chiefly because people felt the need to rework the story this way. It seems that we want to believe that everyone working together for a shared victory is a highly desirable goal. There’s something inherently appealing about this version, which is probably what led to its wide circulation.

However, the real story—about those who went back for the fallen boy despite other runners forging ahead—could be viewed as an even stronger narrative than the version in which all of the runners decide to go along with what the rest of the group is doing. If just about everyone in a group proposes doing a Good Thing it can be as difficult not to go along as if they’d all proposed doing a Bad Thing. It’s still a kind of peer pressure, and it’s the opposite of what Neville did when he stood up to his friends.

The runners who went back gave up their chance to win. They saw that the ones who continued running forward were not sacrificing their chance for victory but they decided to go back anyway, knowing that someone else was definitely going to win and that they were not. They threw in their lot with someone guaranteed to lose. The true story, the one about a small group of people who chose to be “losers”, was not deemed as compelling as the version where the runners all band together to be simultaneous winners. We like stories about winners. Stories about those who elect to lose don’t get wide circulation in our culture—or any culture.

This is the picture that we get of Viktor Krum during the World Cup. Because of the nature of the Seeker position, Viktor acts alone, securing a victory not for his team, but for Ireland, though it isn’t quite the same as if Ireland’s Seeker had caught the Snitch. In a situation where a victory would have been a defeat were it not for the other side showing mercy, which is related to love, Ireland, the “winner”, cannot technically celebrate victory. The opponent has, in his way, secured a victory for himself and the victor through offering mercy. This is what Dumbledore tells Draco is most important when Draco finally has a chance to kill him face to face. Dumbledore says to him, “It is my mercy, and not yours, that matters now.”  

Fred and George bet Ludo Bagman, whose first name means “game”, that Ireland would win but Krum would get the Snitch, and, true to form, when this is exactly what happens, Bagman doesn’t pay up. The match’s outcome is considered unusual and it can be seen as foreshadowing for the draw between Cedric and Harry in the Tournament, when they take the Cup together, but also foreshadowing for Harry sacrificing his life in the seventh book.

After the World Cup Final is over the metaphorical war again segues into a literal one when Death Eaters attack the campground, turning the mockery of wartime camping into a real war. In the trees bordering the campsite, Harry, Ron and Hermione find the “junior” enemy: Draco Malfoy. This is a red herring, since Harry narrowly avoids the real enemy, Barty Crouch, Jr., who’s also in the trees, still hiding under his Invisibility Cloak after stealing Harry’s wand to conjure the Dark Mark. The World Cup in general is a reflection of the last Tournament task and the campsite attack mirrors the Death Eaters gathered by Voldemort at the end of the book. Harry’s wand emitting the Dark Mark is also echoed by his wand forcing Voldemort’s to emit vestiges of the last spells it performed.

Harry encounters two Tournament Champions, which is to say, fellow soldiers—Viktor Krum and Cedric Diggory—at a mock-war, and he encounters two groups who together represent the third Champion, Fleur Delacour: first there are the veelas at the World Cup match, who serve as the mascots for the Bulgarian team. Another group that Harry, Ron and Hermione encounter in the trees during the Death Eater attack are some French-speaking teenagers identified by Hermione as Beauxbatons students. The veelas and these students each represent a side of Fleur, who is part-veela and a student at Beauxbatons. Having now met two future fellow Champions and groups who are surrogates for the third Champion, Harry is ready to become the fourth Triwizard Tournament Champion.

After the Quidditch World Cup, Harry confesses to Ron and Hermione that his scar has been hurting him, even though Voldemort isn’t nearby, and he tells them about his dream of seeing Voldemort kill the old man. Ron discounts it as only a dream but Harry reminds them both of his Divination final, insisting that Professor Trelawney went into a trance and gave a real prophecy, which does seem to be coming true. Like Harry’s “dream”, Ron and Hermione, who disregard Divination even more than dreams, don’t want to believe that the prophecy is real, despite Trelawney accurately predicting Peter’s escape and his return to Voldemort’s service.

To distract Harry from real war, Ron suggests Quidditch, a mock-war, and Harry agrees, though Hermione claims that he doesn’t want to do this. She thinks their obsession with the game has to do with their being boys, though girls also love Quidditch (Cho, Ginny, Alicia, Katie and Angelina, the Chasers on the Gryffindor team when Harry joins it, and more than one player competing in the Quidditch World Cup). Quidditch is simply not Hermione’s bailiwick, even though her romantic entanglements—in other words: the war for her heart—always involve Quidditch in some way.

Another character not taken seriously by many people is Mad-Eye Moody, whose magical precautions against intruders at his house prove ineffective, despite seeming over-the-top. Unfortunately, they don’t prevent his becoming a prisoner in his own trunk while Barty Crouch, Jr. impersonates him for months. Moody is dismissed as paranoid, though it seems like a terrible idea to discount a retired Auror who is on high alert at the mildest provocation. This bias against him leads to no one believing that his dustbins “going off” is not a false alarm, like Harry’s Sneakoscope in the previous book. This allows Barty Crouch, Jr. to imprison Moody and impersonate him. Intentionally or not, Rowling evokes the fairy tale of The Boy Who Cried Wolf. Mad-Eye Moody has raised the alarm so often that when it’s genuine no one credits it, and as a result, Voldemort gets his body back, Cedric Diggory loses his life, and the wizarding world is plunged into chaos and discord once more.

Harry doesn’t play literal Quidditch during his fourth year of school. The Triwizard Tournament takes its place as the chief metaphorical war in Goblet of Fire. At first it seems that Harry won’t be competing, since it’s a very dangerous game and not for children. To protect all but the most advanced students the Tournament is limited to those over the age of seventeen, which is when wizards are considered to be adults. This would also seem to thwart Fred and George Weasley from competing in the Tournament, since their seventeenth birthday won’t arrive until April Fool’s Day.

Fred and George’s birth sign is Aries, which is ruled by the planet Mars. The Greek counterpart to the Roman god of war, Mars, is Ares, the Greek god of war. The twins’ birthday is also the only holiday on the calendar that is devoted exclusively to playing jokes on people. War and play are combined seamlessly in the Weasley twins.

In addition to Fred and George, who are Beaters, the most overtly violent position on the Gryffindor Quidditch team, Rowling only tells readers about Hogwarts students who are also Quidditch players putting their names into the Goblet. Harry is alarmed by the news of one of these.

 “There’s a rumor going around that Warrington got up early and put his name in,” Dean told Harry. “That big bloke from Slytherin who looks like a sloth.”

Harry, who had played Quidditch against Warrington, shook his head in disgust. “We can’t have a Slytherin champion!”

It’s unlikely that every reader will remember who Warrington is so Rowling goes out of her way to remind us that he’s a Quidditch player, a metaphorical warrior. Angelina Johnson, who’s a Gryffindor Chaser, also puts her name in, and Cedric Diggory, Seeker for the Hufflepuff team, plus Viktor Krum, who isn’t a Hogwarts student but is the Seeker for the Bulgarian national Quidditch team. Fleur Delacour is the exception amongst the Champions, though she has a Quidditch connection later.

Since they cannot enter the Tournament, Harry and Ron can only dream of the glory that would be theirs if they did. Harry’s fantasy includes another connection to winning at love:

Harry rolled over in bed, a series of dazzling new pictures forming in his mind’s eye... he had hoodwinked the impartial judge into believing he was seventeen... he had become Hogwarts champion... he was standing in the grounds, his arms raised in triumph in front of the whole school, all of whom were applauding and screaming... he had just won the Triwizard Tournament... Cho’s face stood out particularly clearly in the blurred crowd, her face glowing with admiration...

Harry, a veteran of mock-wars and youngest Seeker in a century, is the fourth Champion when his name unexpectedly emerges from the Goblet. While the Champions are briefed on the first task they are told that they will be “armed only with their wands.” The Tournament is technically a “game”, but the word “armed” acknowledges that they’re in a mock-war, and in the first task, Harry will fight this war using his broom, the weapon he uses to play the mock-war of Quidditch.

A prediction that Ron made during Harry’s third year, while reading tea-leaves in a Divination lesson, was that Harry would be getting “a windfall, unexpected gold.” Harry does get a windfall early in Goblet of Fire when Ron uses leprechaun gold to pay Harry back for the Omnioculars Harry generously buys his friend at the Quidditch World Cup. Ron is disappointed when he learns that the gold evaporated sometime after he gave it to Harry, who has so much gold already that he probably didn’t even notice.

However, it’s likely that a more permanent type of gold is connected to Ron’s off-handed tea-leaf reading, and this is what connects the fourth book in the series to the fourth threshold that Harry crosses with Hagrid in the first book. The first three thresholds were Hagrid bringing Harry to Surrey as a baby, Hagrid bringing Harry his Hogwarts letter and crossing water with him to leave the hut-on-the-rock, and Hagrid taking Harry through the wall of the Leaky Cauldron to go shopping in Diagon Alley. (See Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 11: Wargames, Episode 13: Deus ex Machina, and Episode 15: Prisoner of Quidditch.)

The fourth threshold was Hagrid taking Harry underground at Gringotts so that he could withdraw gold from his bank vault. This makes Harry’s vault a symbolic underworld, which is the appropriate place for him to go to acquire gold left to him by his dead parents.

In Goblet of Fire, Harry goes to another symbolic underworld: the graveyard at Little Hangleton. What he does in the graveyard leads to his getting a windfall of gold after he returns to Hogwarts and is declared the winner of the Triwizard Tournament, for which he receives a thousand gold Galleons in prize money. Harry also sees the ghostly shadows of his parents in the graveyard, the people who left him the gold in his Gringotts vault.

Another connection between Hagrid and Harry’s trip to Gringotts and the fourth book is that on the same day that they were at the bank, Quirrell was also there, trying to steal the Philosopher’s Stone, so he could use it to resurrect Voldemort. In the fourth book, a different Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher, Barty Crouch, Jr., disguised as Mad-Eye Moody, wants to use Harry as a human Philosopher’s Stone. Harry is a symbolic Snitch (see Quantum Harry,the Podcast, Episode 11: Wargames) and the Philosopher’s Stone is also a kind of Snitch, caught by Harry from the Mirror of Erised in the first book. This time the DADA teacher succeeds, since Peter Pettigrew uses Harry’s blood in the spell/ritual/potion that resurrects Voldemort. Harry’s blood, of course, is red, and so is the Philosopher’s Stone.

However, the Philosopher’s Stone does more than one thing. It can be used to make the Elixir of Life, which sustained Nicolas Flamel for centuries, according to the first book in the series. Blood from Harry-the-human-Philosopher’s Stone helps Voldemort to be resurrected, so even though Quirrell was not able to make the Elixir of Life to re-embody Voldemort in Harry’s first year of school, Wormtail succeeds in giving him back his body via a potion that might as well be called the Elixir of Life, as far as Voldemort is concerned, in which Harry’s blood is a vital ingredient. The Philosopher’s Stone was also intended to change base metals into gold. Lead has been used to line coffins since ancient times and lead is also a dangerous metal that, when present in humans in large enough quantities, can kill. Alchemists believed that lead was connected to death and transformation, and lead is, famously, the “base metal” that alchemists were most interested in transforming into gold with the Philosopher’s Stone.

Thus Harry, the human Philosopher’s Stone, turns lead, AKA death—his trip to the graveyard in Little Hangleton—into gold when he returns from that trip and receives the gold Galleons that are the Tournament prize. This being Harry, of course he gives the money away to Fred and George Weasley, representatives of both jokes and war, because of their birthday—April Fool’s Day—and their zodiac sign being linked to Ares, the Greek god of war. They use the money to start their business, creating “joke” products, many of which will serve as weapons in the coming war against the newly-revitalized Voldemort.

Adapted from the script for Quantum Harry, the Podcast, Episode 17: The Goblet of Games, Copyright 2017-2018 by Quantum Harry Productions and B.L. Purdom. See other posts on this blog for direct links to all episodes of Quantum Harry.

  

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